My theory about Ponyo, its characters and its setting
by zman123
Summary: So yeah. I have a theory about Ponyo and how it is actually a sequel to my Neighbor Totoro. Its quite a far fetched one. The way it is very clever is that you would have to notice certain very little details and references to tell the two films are sequels. And also a general analysis on the characters I feel fans often underestimate besides just Sosuke and Ponyo


Ponyo is a good film.  
Likeable characters, adults who actually do anything useful and its a happy and lighthearted film which doesn't talk down to its audience.  
So yeah, I'm a huge fan of this studio's films since My Neighbor Totoro and Howl's Moving castle were also two other great films. I'm assuming most people here saw those two films too.

But one character that really impressed me with her great and above average performance was suprisingly enough not Sosuke or Ponyo or even Fujimoto, as good as they were as characters even if Fujimoto came off as a bit of a jerk at times.

Of the characters I'd have loved to see more of, it would have to be Lisa. Sosuke's mum and a worker at the elderly home.  
People who say Tina Fey (The actress for her) didn't bring her best to this film, I'd have to strongly disagree with.

One thing I always liked about Lisa as a character is that she does right what a lot of animated grown-ups and parents do wrong.  
She genuinely cares about her family and tries to help them when she can, and she teaches her five year old son how to be a good person from a young age.

She also has good priority. She takes Sosuke home first so that he can be safe and man the signal light to keep other ships safe before she goes back to the senior centre to the seniors.  
In other words she tries to keep everyone safe.

I would consider her an underrated character.  
I would say she sets a benchmark for other animated parents to aspire towards.  
I can see why Ponyo would want to stay in her new family even If it means leaving her original family behind.  
Sosuke might have been one heck of a kid hero doing all the heroic things he did, but he needed a good teacher.

Which brings us to my theory that the kind and friendly Lisa is in fact another kind and friendly character from another one of Studio GhibLi's films.  
Lisa is Satsuki from My Neighbour Totoro to be precise.  
Which would make Ponyo a hidden sequel to My Neighbour Totoro.

Miyazaki as a rule, does not enjoy making sequels.  
After all, most sequels aren't as good as the thing that they're a sequel of. And too many sequels leads to seasonal rot and people thinking that the studio is little more than a cheapskate that doesn't know when to stop milking the heck out of a good thing that's long overstayed its welcome.  
Miyazaki seems therefore to decide mostly that it's a good idea to avoid sequels as often as possible since why drag a story on and on instead of just finishing it in a good and satisfying way.  
Why waste time and go to college when you could learn everything you need in secondary school, so to speak.

But Ponyo seems to really work as a sequel.  
If you think about it, My Neighbour Totoro was one of the studio's first films and it was created way back in 1988 when Miyazaki was probably a much younger man with fewer wrinkles and white hairs.  
Ponyo came out in 2008.  
20 years passed since the first one came out, and by that time with how many films Miyazaki had created it was probably all but impossible not to start reusing some of the ideas he'd previously used before.

But he didn't want one of his only sequels (Castle in the sky is the only other sequel I can think about and its certainly nowhere near as popular as what it was meant to be a sequel about) to look too much like its ancestor.

So he decided to take the same plot and change it up a little.  
Sort of like how you might take apart a machine and using the same parts build another machine, so to speak.

My Neighbour Totoro and Ponyo both seem to explore similar themes. They both take place in different places but both are about when the fantasy world and our world collide.  
A young, very kind but also very naïve hero or heroine befriends a fantasy being during a low point in their lives.  
For Mei, she befriended Totoro after her mother had been put into hospital for a very serious disease and her family had moved to the countryside to be near to the mother so that she probably had to leave behind a lot of what she had.  
For Sosuke, he wasn't very well liked at his school and his father often went away from the home so that he was left by himself to cheer up his clearly very lonely and upset mother.

Both Mei and Sosuke were at a point in their lives when they could be considered quite lonely and in need of a friend.

And both met their fantasy non human companion at that exact time.

Both of them were open minded enough to give their new friends a chance as weird as the new friend seemed at first sight.  
Totoro had a downright frightening look with sharp teeth and big claws. Ponyo wasn't exactly normal looking for a generic fish.  
And for a while, no one realized their new friend existed.

Sosuke seems to be a counterpart to Mei. He's the youngest main character and he tends to be the more rash and spur of the moment decision maker of the main cast.  
And he's the first to get curious about something he should not be getting curious about as well as the first to meet the new friend.  
The first to follow the white rabbit down the hole.  
The main difference is that while Mei spent the majority of her film being helped by others and making decisions that got her into problems, like when she tried to get to the hospital and got lost, Sosuke spends his film being the hero that makes good and wise decisions which proved his ability to think wisely despite his young age.  
He was the one who calmed his grieving mum down when she was getting upset that his dad wasn't home yet.  
He was the one who freed Ponyo from the bottle she was trapped inside in the first place.  
He also took good care of the house when his mum went back to the seniors home and proved himself to be a very responsible lad who was quick to adapt to even the most extreme situations.

These changes distinguish Sosuke and Mei as characters, believing that in some respects the goal of Ponyo was to create a "My Neighbour Totoro" where Mei played a bigger part and made more clever decisions since in the original Totoro, Mei was only considered the secondary main character.

Which brings us back to our feature character analysis of Lisa.

In many respects Lisa seems to step into the shoes from Satsuki.  
She is the responsible and more grown up figure for Sosuke, and is the second to discover the supernatural elements of her respective film.  
She doesn't believe her son at first but is quick to change her mind, in the same way it took Satsuki some time for her to realize that Totoro was real.

The main difference being that as a mother for Sosuke instead of just an older sister, she has an even greater share of responsibility for his behaviour and actions and is able to affect him in a much more powerful way.  
Just as Satsuki seemed the most affected by her potentially dying and sick mother in Totoro, Lisa seems to be taking the absence of her husband much more seriously and badly than her son.  
Part of this stems from the fact that both characters are older and as a result more mature but also more able to fully grasp the implications of what they stand to lose.

The film Ponyo seems to want to hand more screentime and spotlight to its version of "Mei" and the younger main character while deducting it from the older more mature main character.  
In Totoro, it was Satsuki who went to Totoro to ask for his help in finding Mei while in Ponyo, the balance of nature is instead restored by Sosuke's loving and protective actions that he performs for Ponyo while Lisa is rushed away to go back and help the seniors instead.

There is also a scene in Totoro where Satsuki runs for a very long distance until her sandals are damaged to find her missing younger sister.  
There is a scene in Ponyo where Lisa makes several very risky and high speed driving tricks to outrun the storm and get her son and herself back home safely before just as quickly rushing back to the care home to help the seniors. All while travelling at high speeds along very dangerous roads for a very long distance and no time to rest.

Notice a recurring theme?

 **So how did Satsuki become Lisa then?  
** Its not actually uncommon for some people to change their names as they get older for a multitude of reasons.  
Off the top of my head, a very successful company called the William Morris agency was started by the guy its named after. But his original name was "Zelman Moses" and he came from Germany and not America where he started his very successful business.

Sometimes people are nicknamed by their friends and when they've heard a nickname for long enough and its more attractive than their real name, they often ditch their real name and only use it for very special occasions.  
Samantha might become Sam, as one example.

In the same way I believe that Lisa is a grown up Satsuki, I believe that Koichi her husband, is a grown up Kanta.  
The boy who was originally on very good terms with Satsuki but later befriended her and even took great pains to help her out by giving her his umbrella in the rain and cycling to the hospital to help her look for Mei.  
Supporting my theory is the appearance of both Ponyo characters in relation to their supposed younger versions.

Koichi certainly looks a lot like Kanta when he wears his sailor hat.  
And aside from slightly longer hair, Lisa doesn't look too greatly different from Satsuki apart from wearing a different outfit.

Koichi also fills a similar role to Kanta in that he's not on good terms with the main female main character at first but quickly makes amends later despite not having a great deal of screentime.  
It seems that Ponyo's version of Kanta had his screentime lessened even more so that its version of Mei could have more time focused on her.

My personal theory is this.  
Sometime after the events of Totoro, Satsuki moved from Japan to go to another country.  
Possibly to study abroad since a few scenes in that movie seemed to suggest her as an academically gifted student that took studies very seriously.  
This country might well have been America, and the university she went to might well have been Harvard since Lisa sounds like a distinctly western name which is fairly common but usually reserved for a daughter from a fairly high income family.  
(High income and low income families tend to give children very different names. Also think Lisa Simpsons from the Simpsons if you know that show).

The change in name from Satsuki to Lisa could also be symbolic to a change in personality.  
Satsuki as a word refers to the archaic and ancient version of the word "May" while Lisa seems more modern and doesn't really have a meaning outside of just being a name.  
It could show that now Satsuki is more rational and less likely to overreact to things that are not important since she stays fairly calm throughout the entire flood and doesn't freak out too much when she hears her son's explanation about Ponyo.

So Satsuki, now "Lisa" moved to America for a brief time.  
Rents closer to the university tended to cost a lot and she didn't have all that much money so she instead lived quite far from it and had to get up at the crack of dawn while driving a great distance to reach the university.  
This at least is my personal theory for why Lisa is such a skilled driver.

Her driving moments for me do not show her as a bad, unskilled or even negligent driver simply that she is an above average driver that knows how to push the car to the absolute limits when necessary.  
Had she not been such a great driver she might never have brought her son and herself home safely and may even have drowned in the rising sea.  
Since notice that she does slow down and drive more smoothly when she gets past the dangerous bit of road with a lot of water.

Possibly she began to miss her original home of Japan and eventually decided to move back.  
It was probably when she moved back that she became close to Kanta/Koichi again and realized how much she needed him.

His changing name could also be a sign of increasing maturity since Koichi sounds more formal and more complex of a word as well as being harder to pronounce correctly.

And of course, Lisa is very quick to accept that Ponyo is a fish who has turned into a person and just as quick to accept that her son and herself were needed to restore balance to the world by taking good care of Ponyo.  
Such open mindedness can't just come out of nowhere since Satsuki took far longer to accept Totoro's existence.

Some scenes where Lisa talks to her husband (Especially the Morse code scene Lol) are very similar to Satsuki's interactions with Kanta.  
There's one scene where Kanta tells Satsuki her house is haunted, and another scene where Satsuki sticks her tongue out and says that she hates boys.  
Basically a lot of light hearted and playful teasing and banter where each side takes jabs at the other side without being truly malicious.

The main difference being that Koichi has even less focus than Kanta so he is relegated to simply apologizing that he simply cannot come home sooner and is not able to be given much of a personality.  
Possibly his change in name could also reflect that he is now a nicer person since he doesn't seem upset at his wife for being angry at something he cannot help.

Sosuke being named what he is named is also a clever reference since Sosuke is really just a more masculine version of Satsuki. Sort of like Daniel and Danielle.  
It is probably to show that Lisa sees her younger self reflected in him when he does the nice things he does like comforting her when her husband is away and being responsible enough to be left on his own when she needs to be elsewhere.

So to conclude I guess, I would just state the following:

Satsuki from Totoro = Lisa from Ponyo  
Kanta from Totoro = Koichi from Ponyo

And now for characters who aren't the same but fill the same roles.  
Mei = Sosuke

Totoro = Ponyo (With the obvious twist being that she is the one who needs help from her human friends rather than the other way around)

So long story short, Ponyo is what Totoro would be like if Totoro was the one who needed help instead of being the one providing help.  
The plot is darker and edgier with more of a conflict and higher stakes since if Sosuke doesn't complete his mission the world is flooded an Ponyo turns to sea foam.

And Lisa is an aged Satsuki who is lucky enough to see magic twice in her lifetime.  
Mei isn't mentioned because she isn't needed for the plot and Sosuke is already filling her role.  
That and the director doesn't want to make it obvious that Ponyo is a sequel to Totoro.

Along the same logic I would say that one of the things the professor dad (from Totoro) was studying in his archaeology department was about a moving castle that could move.  
Most if not all of the studio Ghibli films take place in the same world in my opinion.

Also the technology in Ponyo looks slightly more advanced than Totoro, but there's still no sign of any computers and not many Tv's showing the amount of time that passed can't be that much.

The one other thing I also wonder about is why Ponyo can't just be called Ariel.  
And why Fujimoto her dad can't just be called Triton instead.  
That's who her reminds me of.

So what do you guys think?


End file.
